Month: April 2019

At the level of principle, and certainly practice, I think the world needs assholes.  It needs people insufficiently concerned with social niceties to refrain from saying things nobody else will say.  Quite often, until somebody vocalizes the obvious, no one is willing to act on it.

The essence of the Fabian method–and it has succeeded spectacularly and continues to do so–is that smiling, polite psychopaths can rule the world by making it impolite for anyone to oppose them.  They simply ask a little more, day by day, month by month, year by year, until you have people getting arrested for saying boys can’t become girls just by declaring themselves to be.  This is 2019 in Britain, home of Fabianism (whose window is still on the London School of Economics).

You need people who prefer to be alone with their truth, to people willing to accommodate themselves to anything just to avoid social censure.  Small concessions, continued over time, become large concessions.  Concede nothing. 

Use good manners if you can.  I need to find and cultivate more diplomatic ways of telling people to go fuck themselves, but however it gets expressed, crudely or eloquently, concede nothing in principle.

We live in a fantastic nation.  We live in a fantastic time, with endless possibility, but we have countless traitors to our way of life who–knowingly or not–are trying to tear it all down.  I truly believe this.

If the world would merely imitate us, if it would protect human rights, particularly property rights, protect free trade, and political freedom, it would become us.  They do not need to come here.  There are no secrets to our success.  

This was my graduate student advisor: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/frank-e-reynolds-1930-2019

He was good to me, but I think I kind of pissed him off at one point.  It was my fault.

I only earned an A.M.  I did not apply to the Ph.D program for several reasons, but one of them was a reasonable expectation I would not get in, because I was even then a cranky, curmudgeonly human being.  I was smart enough, but grumpy. 

The river keeps flowing for all of us.  We can move our boats left or right, but we can’t stop the tide of time. I am downstream from decisions made then.  They were the correct decisions.  Some of my curmudgeonliness was warranted.  I was a man in the wrong place.

I have never stopped chasing my golden Snitch, though.  I can say that honestly.  It has evaded me, but I have never stopped chasing, and I continue both to get closer, and to get better at my closing skills.

It occurs to me that mourning requires a slot, perhaps a cylinder, or a channel, which goes up and down.  It needs to be fed and watered, but it does not spread out.  It is inherently a personal, not a social process.  I would this is true even for social losses, like 9/11.  Everyone mourns in their own way, in their own time.

Mourning was a topic we focused on in graduate school.  The professor who taught the required “intro” course was Peter Homans.  Here is his obituary: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/peter-homans-religious-scholar-who-examined-transformative-power-loss-psychology-1930-2009

I also took a course on religion and death, and learned a lot.  I remember particularly a book we read on rural Greek mourning traditions.  At the time of the writing they still kept ossuaries, which is where a deceased person is buried, mourned ritually for a specific period of time, then after a further passing of time, disinterred, and their bones placed in what almost amounts to a grave closet with other bones of the community.

There is something about mourning which makes us human.  It means we loved.  It means we ARE loved, when we know we will be missed when we are gone.  You cannot experience loss without a sense of presence.

I suppose I am mourning something myself, something complex.  I could give it many names, but at this precise moment it does not want to be named.

This up and down, though, versus sideways, is an important emotional image.  I feel that strongly.

I might phrase it like this: some days are better than other days, but all days spent mourning are YOUR days, and no one else’s.  They are your relationship with your grief.  You are at the top, and the grief is at the bottom, and you both slide back and forth.  Again, this is what I feel.

This one was not as bad.  I think it could be read, on one level, as a kind and non-polemical argument against abortion.  It is highly morally complex, and completely worth watching.

This sort of cinema is life affirming.  I think if it was what we were all watching, all the time, our world would be a much better, much more nuanced, much more listening place.

One more to go, then I will have seen them all.

Oi.  I’m tempted to say “Damn you, Kryzsztof Kieslowski”, but of course he was an honest humanitarian. His art was telling us who we are, and what our lives are like.  The world is a better place that he lived.

I just watched the first Decalogue, and as with substantially every other one, I cried.  What pain.  I had put off watching these, because I knew this would happen.  Still, I think this is how one gathers wealth, of the sort that matters.

In dealing with fear, one cannot neglect the fear of grief and loss.  And dealing with fear, dealing with grief and loss, are acquired skills, I suppose.  They are amenable to practice, and I suppose that is what this art does.  I have not lost anything.  Everything is well with me.  And no one actually lost anything in the film.  It was all make believe.  But of course, for a time, for an hour, we have long since learned to live a fictional world, which some part of our minds cannot separate easily from the real one.

There is a lesson here.  The Greeks were onto something with tragedy: it is a way of helping us all learn to make peace with the inevitability of death, decay, sorrow and loss.  It is practice.  I have never thought of it that way.

And obviously one can practice avoiding these things.  One can practice superficiality.  The most obvious way is violence.  Grief easily becomes rage, making rage an often-substitute for more real underlying feelings.  Perhaps the violence in our media is structurally necessary because we have forgotten how to mourn, how to share our pain.

I have proposed before, and forgotten until now, that the movie “Because of Winn-Dixie” would become a Christmas classic, if the world were emotionally rational.

But of course it isn’t, not generally.  I guess the best we can aspire to is to create islands of comfort and understanding in an unreasoning, and storm tossed endless sea.

I dreamed of how one would comfort this father.  There are no words, but there is a spirit.

It occurs to me to comment that all fear is rational.  It is simply the case with Stable Fear Patterns that the nervous system is reacting rationally to a threat which is no longer present, a fact which it simply lacks the capacity to learn, due to limitations in our nervous systems.  We don’t reset like zebras (who do not get ulcers).

I might comment on this score that my own health is outstanding.  Even as a large man, I have reasonably normal blood pressure.  My cholesterol was a bit high the last time it was tested, but I attribute that to my drinking.  Nothing good happens when 250 ml of hard liquor won’t get you drunk.

But I literally cannot remember the last time I had a cold.  I’ve only had the flu once in my life, during my stint at a Large American Corporation which had me having nightly anxiety dreams.  I don’t do LAC’s very well.

I just don’t get sick.  I never need to go to the doctor for anything.

I attribute this to the fact that, while I obviously have a lot of fairly severe “issues”, I am tackling them head on.  I am not suppressing or avoiding them.  I am not hoping they will go away.  I am dealing with them realistically and directly.  This is very important.  You may be crazy, but it gets worse if you pretend you are not.  As the Tao Te Ching says, those who know they are crazy are not crazy.  Words to live by.

I was listening to a thing (“Can you learn to be lucky?” which claimed that Freud claimed that all ambition is neurotic.  I would provisionally disagree.  There are grades of ambition.  I myself am highly ambitious: I want to be sane before I die, with sane being defined as a relatively high level of spiritual advancement, relative to the averages we have accustomed ourselves to gradually in the past however long.  I don’t want to be on my deathbed saying “what the fuck just happened?  That was not my beautiful wife.  That was not my large automobile (h/t to David Byrne, of course)”.

Shit the point I wanted to make before I began that circle–it’s always circles with me, interlocking, connecting, going God only knows where–was that Stable Fear Patterns (SFP’s, although I’m not going to be the sadist who starts recurring to that) underlie a large amount of behavior we see out there, and that means that much of what people do is driven.  They are not, in other words, the primary drivers.  Some part of their nervous system hits the gas, and their only choice is how to direct that nervous energy.  Many people learn to direct it very productively, and they become the elites in everything.  But take, say, Tom Brady.  It may be that he is, even now, driven by fear of failure.  In his particular case, though, I would say, as he has said, that it has become fun.  But early on that was likely a large factor.  This is true for many greats in all fields: medicine, architecture, business, etc.

Being a driver does not mean you cannot accomplish a lot.  But it means you do not NEED to, and that when a pause of some sort is needed, you can take it.  While granting I do not know much about his life, it is my understanding that in the middle of his career, while he was doing very well, Wagner just stopped for a period of years.  He wanted to be sure he was really doing what he wanted to do.  So he just stopped, and relative to his usual work output, sat on his hands for several years, maybe more.

From the outside, without more data, that would seem to be a genuinely creative personality.  There are times when the work flows into you, and you have to allow it to flow out, but in these cases, there is structure, there is content.  True, there is relief, but it not a constant driving tension, and it can be expressed, and released, creating a positive feeling.

I myself exist in an uneasy crossfire between what are most likely multiple SFP’s and a corresponding counter-reaction asking me to do nothing, to tell those SFPs to fuck themselves, because I’m getting drunk and fucking up all their plans.  But of course they don’t have plans.  All they do is give me fear, and if I had a place where fear was constructive, like the military or law enforcement, I would be able to rationalize it as necessary and appropriate.  But I don’t.

So I continue to sit back and watch these fields interacting with one another, trying to learn to massage them into more reasonable, more palatable, more constructive shapes.  This is Nye, as I understand the concept.

286, I remembered, and a third of a bottle of Aquavit.  I like Aquavit. That is not a therapeutic dose for me, so that is a sort of progress.

I slept tolerably well.  Restless, but no major traumatic emergences.  I spent some time dreaming the inner emotional reality of my marriage, and part of my time being in high school, trying to decide what to do with my life.  I could be a painter, or an engineer.  A doctor or a lawyer.  Or I could found a religion.  What? some voice inside me said.  That isn’t a thing.  That’s not one of the categories.  There’s no box for that.

Well, I said, it could be looked at as artwork.  Most art is largely useless, so if I’m wasting my time, there is a precedent.  It seemed to be OK with that.

And I spent a lot of time dealing with what I will call “emotion shapes”, things which had visible appearances and corresponding emotional tones, but which I could not name.   When you are dealing with unconscious forces they can hide behind X and Y.  You know there is a quantity/quality of some sort, but you can’t solve for it.  You can merely watch the math being done.

Overall, compared to how I imagine normal sleep for most emotionally healthy people, I’d give it a B-, which is quite good.  I’m mostly F’s.

I was looking at a woman tonight–I do actually get out pretty regularly–and I could feel she was someone who judges everyone and complains about everything.  Someone who is hard to get along with.

And the phrase “Stable Fear Structure” and “Stable Fear pattern” popped in my head.  Who is she?  Well, if I myself am judging her correctly, and finding the right things wrong with her (note to self: what WAS it that made me look at her?), then she has a stable fear structure which is present in all interactions with everyone.  It has been with her since before her memory formed and it is unlikely to ever disappear.  It defines her.

This concept, of Stable Fear Structure, as a durable personality trait, is useful.  Some analogue may exist in “the literature” somewhere, but this is my proposal for a name.

What if we chose sex partners based on our perception of their ability with respect to pillow talk?  Women, I think, may do this often, but men, we–I, historically–only think through to the orgasm, after which–ugly as it is–the woman often becomes a nuisance.  I don’t deny this is pretty awful, but I doubt there are many people, male or female, who truly have no idea what I am talking about.

For me, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, I pulled myself out of circulation a long time ago, and will not go back in until I feel I have become a better person.

What if, though, pillow talk is the best part of the whole thing?  What if we made it the focus?  I think where it is good, those people become lovers for a long time.  That moment is a good time to feel heard, deep down in your bones.

Je T’aime, Je t’aime, Je t’aime.

I am just thinking out loud.  I am realizing I am a product of our popular culture.  I was taught next to nothing by any adults in my life that was worth a damn. I inherited stubbornness from my father, and neuroticism from my mother.  They had little else to give me.

It’s so hard, in mid-life, to learn new tricks.  Far from impossible, though. As I grow, though–and I’ve said this often, I am aware, but sometimes you need to speak things over and over and over to make them feel true–I realize how much I have lost.

If I might reference Buddhism again, Duhkha is losing and not realizing you are losing, not seeing it, not seeing open paths you might have taken but could not see for blindness, want of looking, or lack of flexibility.

Growth involves feeling this pain.  But it is a good pain, a real pain, a truly redemptive pain, and one well worth the effort. This pain is being tickled with a feather, not being smashed with a hammer, or cut in a thousand places.  That is what you can leave behind.  What you are leaving behind is being an object, an object which feels, but which cannot control its destiny.

I don’t know if I am brilliant, crazy, absurdly arrogant, or some combination of the three.  It is most likely the last, though. Still, my words are my own.  My thoughts are my own.  What you do not often see here is me discussing other peoples ideas, although I do do it.

I live alone.  I live in silence.  Sometimes it is hard, but it is real.  And the world comes at me here, in silence.  It is never out there.  It was always in here.  I have simply eliminated the noise that prevented me from seeing and feeling it.

Who knows what my destiny is?  Whatever it is, I feel increasingly open to it.  If there is a purpose to life, then I am fulfilling my purpose, as well as I can at the moment, which is not well, but it truly is the best I can do, when it rains pain as often as it does.

So often we get stuck in loops, where the only goal is to make it through each day.  You make it, then reset somehow and do it again the next day.  You can cross a life like this, and learn very little.  But I feel it is very common.  Very, very common.

Spiritual teaching is teasing, perhaps pulling, people away from their petty manias.